Enduring Truths
Enduring Truths
Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is professor of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in China
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19213-0 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25738-9 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226257389.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo, author.
Enduring Truths : Sojourner’s shadows and substance / Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby.
pages : illustrations ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-19213-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-25738-9 (e-book) 1. Truth, Sojourner, –1883. 2. African American women abolitionists—United States—Biography. 3. Truth, Sojourner, –1883—Portraits. 4. African American women abolitionists—Portraits. I. Title.
E185.97.T8G75 2015
306.3'62092—dc23
[B]
2014038311
This book has been printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. THE EARLY CARTES DE VISITE
1. Truth in Indiana 1861
2. Truth as Libyan Sibyl
3. Truth in Michigan 1863
PART II. SHADOWS AND SUBSTANCE
4. Truth’s Captioned Cartes de Visite after 1864
5. Shadows and Chemistry
PART III. TEXTS AND CIRCULATING PAPER
6. Truth’s Illiteracy
7. Truth’s Copyright
8. Money and the Civil War
PART IV. COLLECTING AND THE LATE PHOTOGRAPHS
9. Album Politics
10. Truth’s Last Portraits 1881–83
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
This book began in 2007, when I purchased a carte de visite of Sojourner Truth that had been the final photograph in the family album of Ann Heald. Damaged and cropped, this small, modest picture is a fascinating historical object combining photography, mechanical printing, and multiple handwritten inscriptions indicating that Ann Heald had bought the card at a lecture given by Sojourner Truth in West Branch, Iowa, in 1870. I cherish this first object from the Civil War period and thank Ann’s descendant William Heald of Healdsburg, California, for selling it to me and telling me so much about his exceptional ancestors. I hope this book will please him and others who have since sold or shared their cartes de visite from that tumultuous era. I am grateful that Scott McCorkhill, descendant of Truth’s friends the Demings, sent me digital images of his family album and taught me about his amazing forebearers. I also thank historian Nell Irvin Painter, who shared her personal copy of an especially vivid, somewhat irritated Sojourner Truth, now held at Duke University, and collector Bruce Lundberg for providing me with digital images of his two cartes de visite.
In 2007 I presented my first thoughts on Truth’s portraits thanks to Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, who invited me to speak at their conference Out of Sight: New World Slavery and the Visual Imagination
at Northwestern University. In 2012 I gave a related talk at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Art History Department at Princeton University. I remember helpful, probing comments from both audiences. In writing this book, I have learned from so many scholars; I thank them for their generosity in the midst of busy lives. Fashion historian Joan Severa kindly devoted much time to studying and describing what Truth wears in her pictures. Literary scholar and colleague Stephen Best wrote a book, Fugitive Property, that inspired me, and he also directed me to helpful sources on slavery and the law. Literary scholar Ann Banfield attempted to teach me about the complexity of first-person statements and proper names. I wish I had her theoretical sophistication and sensitivity to language. Curator and friend Roger Hankins taught me about making clay pots. Rhetoric professor Marianne Constable pressed me when she served as a respondent to my symposium on photography and the law, as did fellow speaker Steve Edwards, who spoke on the history of patents in nineteenth-century England. Productive too was the resistance of Saidiya Hartman in her few, surely forgotten, remarks to me at the Out of Sight
conference. Scholar Jan Von Brevern participated in a helpful conversation about early photography and gave me his own translation of one of his pertinent articles in German. Photographic historian Anne McCauley shared her thoughts about copyright. Margaret Washington assisted me in my search for the history of Sojourner Truth’s copyright. George Livingston, Local and Family Librarian, was very helpful in pursuing sources at the Willard Library in Battle Creek, Michigan. Most recently, I have learned much from Leigh Raiford, with whom I taught a seminar on black visual culture. I also thank Todd Olson, Jessica May, and Julia Bryan-Wilson for reading an early draft of this book, and Gregoria Grigsby-Olson for key writing suggestions.
Student researchers have played an immense role in tracking down primary sources, including pictures. Through UC Berkeley’s invaluable Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program, many enthusiastically waded through archives. I sincerely thank Sonia Fleury, now a lawyer, for her amazingly thorough research both at UC Berkeley and, thanks to the Townsend Humanities Center GROUP Summer Fellowship, in Battle Creek and Detroit, Michigan; she compiled huge dossiers on which I depended. I also thank Melodie Yashar for her smart and persevering research on photography and copyright; she tracked down the record of Sojourner Truth’s copyright. Katie Hornstein examined and photographed archives held at the University of Michigan. Thanks go as well to Cassie Stanzler for her work in the Leggett Papers at the Detroit Public Library; to Emilie Boone for research at the Chicago History Museum; and to UC Berkeley undergraduates Theresa Sims, Claire Desmond, Kathryn Krolopp, Hannah Lowe, and Kaitlin Richardson. Ongoing graduate students Camille Mathieu, Kailani Polzak, and Alexandra Courtois also deserve thanks for support of many kinds.
Author’s maternal grandmother, Gregoria Allmallategui, Panama, 1960s?
Photographer Julie Wolf of the UC Berkeley History of Art Department beautifully and patiently produced the majority of the photographs in this book, for which I am extremely grateful. I thank Jason Hosford, Senior Digital Curator, History of Art, for valiantly tracking down the outstanding illustrations and permissions. And I express my abiding gratitude to Linda Fitzgerald for her creative, large-minded reinvention of our Visual Resource Center, formerly devoted to the making and cataloguing of slides and now serving the faculty’s publication needs.
At the University of Chicago Press, I am very grateful that my editor, Susan Bielstein, believed in this book from its very beginnings and shepherded it to its beautiful realization. I also thank her associates, Anthony Burton and James Toftness; and the manuscript editor, Sandra Hazel; and the designer, Ryan Li.
: : :
During my health challenges of the past decade, Sojourner Truth has been the most marvelous of companions. Poor and often ill, always engaged with the larger world, always fighting its inequities, she has been an inspiration. I will miss thinking about her in the daily way that writing a book requires. People in my life have given me glimpses of her character: my immensely hardworking, tall, handsome friend Maureen Beck, whose unflagging energy even now in her late sixties makes it possible for me to believe that Sojourner Truth did all that she did in her sixties, seventies, and eighties; my very smart, pragmatic, self-made, and equally hardworking sister, Lynne Grigsby, whose down-to-earth, unsentimental insights also help me imagine Sojourner Truth; and, living on in my memories and photographs, my powerful, proud Panamanian grandmother, Gregoria Allmallategui, who raised five children by working as a seamstress and by selling tamals and aphrodisiacs; with little education, she acted as a legal advocate for poor people like herself. She assumed, as did Sojourner Truth, that she could intervene in courts of law. Like Truth, she tactically wielded forthright speech on behalf of the disenfranchised.
For sustaining me, as always, I thank my family and friends: Lynne Grigsby, Peter and Andrea Walters, Trish Reed and Jack Rosenberg, Jan Leigh and Michael Fahy, Francesca and Emil Rose, Julia Bryan-Wilson and Mel Chen, Anne Wagner and Tim Clark, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Diane Miliotes, Timiza and Lee Wagner, Anna Seidler, Erika Naginski, Huey Copeland, Andre Dombrowski, Nina Dubin, Roger Hankins, Michael Miller, Leigh Raiford, Christina Kaier, Linda Fitzgerald, Michael Thompson, and Marlee Fry. At UCSF, I am grateful for my selfless physician, Jeffrey Wolf, and the nurses, whose heroism is matched by their sense of humor.
And finally, for inspiration and joy and shared history, I thank my husband, Todd Olson—brilliant intellectual and domestic warrior; no one is more nurturing, loyal, and hardworking than you. Once again, a book gives me the opportunity to tell my children how much they mean to me. Thank you, Gregoria, so supremely serious, outrageously funny, thoughtful, insightful, and gorgeous; and thank you, Wilgens Pierre, whirlwind life force, ever so talented, bright, charismatic, and exquisitely handsome. You three make me laugh and laugh, thank goodness. You also help me do my hard work.
Introduction
The decision of the anti-slavery question should not be left to the stern logic of events
which is wrought by the bullet and bayonet. More knowledge is needed.
—SUSAN B. ANTHONY, speech to the Women’s Loyal National League, New York City, July 25, 1864¹
In 1863 American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, champion of the new stereograph, admitted with some chagrin to
the greater popularity of card-portraits, which, as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the sentimental green-backs
of civilization, within a very recent period. . . . We . . . will not quarrel with the common taste which prefers the card-portrait. The last is cheapest, the most portable, requires no machine to look at it with, can be seen by several persons at the same time,—in short, has all the popular elements. Many care little for the wonders of the world brought before their eyes by the stereoscope; all love to see the faces of their friends.²
According to Holmes, the ordinary people hovering over small, humble card-portraits, or cartes de visite, were ignoring the wonders of the world.
He also believed they were turning their eyes away from the American Civil War, writing:
Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt those whose soul sickens at such sights. It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these [photographic] views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead that they too vividly represented.³
Holmes, himself traumatized by his son’s experiences as a Union soldier, recognizes the desire to repress the actual sight of the stained and sordid,
the need to lock photographs such as Alexander Gardner’s famous images of corpse-strewn battlefields in a secret drawer
and the recesses of our cabinet.
⁴ Against the sickening sight of mutilated remains,
Holmes casts cartes de visite as a domestic frivolity.
What are these humble objects that inspire such derision on the part of an eloquent champion of photography? First invented and patented in 1854 by French photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, cartes de visite responded to the practices of the European elite.⁵ A substitute for the calling card, the carte de visite sustained its small size, approximately two and a half by four inches; the albumen photograph made from a glass negative was just smaller than the cardboard mount to which it was glued. The production of multiple portraits had been made cheap and easy by Disdéri’s invention of a special camera with four lenses so that a single negative could include four shots on the same plate. By the end of the 1850s, the craze for the relatively inexpensive cartes de visite had reached the United States.⁶ Americans who could never have afforded a painted or daguerreotype portrait or even a relatively inexpensive tintype could now have their likenesses memorialized. Combining affordability, repeatability, and portability across great distances thanks to the remarkable US postal system, the new cards appealed to a vast nation of dispersed people. As one fan wrote of the carte de visite in 1862, A man can now have his likeness taken for a dime, and for three cents more, he can send it across plains, mountains, and rivers, over thousands of miles to his distant friends.
⁷ Of course one card might cost as little as a dime, but you could not buy a single carte de visite. Still, they were less expensive than tintypes or ambrotypes, which were unique direct-positive images on iron and glass respectively.⁸ The fan writing in 1862 was right that cartes de visite had made portraiture available to many for the very first time.
And unlike earlier photographs, these diminutive portraits were made as multiples and could be replicated in great numbers and distributed among many. Photographers often advertised on the backs of cards that they kept negatives so that new orders of old portraits could be made years later. (Yet even in 1872, when cartes de visite had become immensely popular, some chose to pay for the unique photograph; a mother explained, for example, that she would rather track her son’s growth over a series of tintypes than be forced to purchase many cartes de visite from one session.)⁹
The widespread availability of cheap photographic portraits made as multiples ushered in a revolution in representation. And that revolution accompanied the most horrific war fought on American ground between Americans. Holmes was wrong. Cartomania
was a consequence of the Civil War, not its repression. All
especially love to see the faces of their friends
and family when separated, perhaps forever, by war. The desperate desire to memorialize the beloved was keenly felt both by those who stayed at home and by those who went away. Here is one soldier’s diary entry of 1863:
I want to
see my Dear wife oh
if I had her photograph
but I see her almost
Every night and in the
morning when I wake
up what a disappoint
ment no wife by
my side no Kezia
all alone.¹⁰
Longing, photographs, and dreams of a soldier who feels himself all alone
without his wife at his side: cartes de visite were not as isolated from war as Holmes would make us believe. Even the example of his son, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice, attests to the ways the little albumen photographs glued onto cardboard were imbricated with the national crisis, playing many roles. The son’s Civil War writings are rife with suffering bodies, amputation, injury, and physical assault. Yet Holmes Jr. joked when he asked his father for six photographs of himself, The 2/3 lengths—they are stunners—I think I’d rather play my game with that dummy than in person.
The image of the dummy who could serve as his substitute during war is a poignant fantasy.¹¹ And when Holmes Jr. foresaw his own death, he decided to inscribe his wishes on the back of the photographic portrait to be found on his body: If I am killed you will find a Mem. on the back of a picture I carry wh. please attend to.
¹²
As we will see, cartes de visite registered the war and played their own part in it. Not hidden in the recesses of cabinets, they were found instead in the pockets of the dead, in tens of thousands of letters, in family albums, in public lectures and political campaigns.¹³ Cartes de visite raised money for war orphans, veterans, many of them amputees, and also recently freed slaves. Mountainous stacks of cartes de visite of military officers, victims of war, government officials, and other celebrities were on sale at photographic studios and bookstores.¹⁴
Most cartes de visite were portraits, but some attest to an ambition to represent the war more generally, even in this small-scale format. A few cartes de visite depict landscapes, battle sites, and military prisons; others staged still lives, featuring, for example, a row of dead soldiers’ boots or tattered flags. A carte made by Sayre and Chase of Newark, Ohio, displays the scarred battle flag of the Seventy-Sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry as well as a sword, a scabbard, and an officer’s sash hanging from a line perfunctorily stretched across the studio (fig. 1). Leaning against the floorboards are two large, framed albumen photographs of two Union generals: at the right, Charles Robert Woods, who organized the Seventy-Sixth Ohio, and his brother William Burnham Woods. Both men survived the war; astonishingly, both became Supreme Court justices, like the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The photographs are not themselves cartes de visite but larger prints deemed worthy of frames, not merely inclusion in an album. In this carte de visite, torn and tattered relics of war are supplemented by portraiture. Photography’s indexicality—its registration of what has been
—serves as a form of incontestable evidence: here, for instance, are scarred, inanimate objects that testify to battle and connote both courage and suffering.¹⁵ And here is a medium capable so economically of incorporating portraiture into its visualization of a past. Yet this carte de visite oddly miniaturizes the men it is intended to honor; the framed portraits point to the living actors who wielded swords and flags but also commemorates them and suggests their deaths. Photographic portraits cannot indicate whether sitters are alive or dead. The medium’s memorializing power overwhelms the present even as it promises presence rather than absence.
FIGURE 1. Pro-Union carte de visite commemorating the Seventy-Sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry and Generals Charles Robert Woods and William Burnham Woods, ca. 1865. On the verso: Sayre and Chase of Newark Ohio.
This and other figures are from the author’s collection unless otherwise indicated.
Holmes Sr. claimed that Americans were burying the remains of the dead
in the recesses of [their] cabinet.
Instead, the proliferation of cartes de visite attests to Americans’ desire to remember one another through images even when those images represented people as shadows overpowered by the strangely vivid—and sometimes mutilated—inert things of the world. Discussing an epistolary friendship with a photograph collector who finally sent his portrait in the mail, Holmes Sr. conceded with some humor:
A photographic intimacy between two persons who never saw each other’s faces (that is, in Nature’s original positive, the principal use of which, after all, is to furnish negatives from which portraits may be taken) is a new form of friendship. . . . And so these shadows have made him with his outer and his inner life, a reality for you; and but for his voice, which you have never heard, you know him better than hundreds who call him by name, as they meet him year after year, and reckon him among their familiar acquaintances.¹⁶
Holmes may have been overly confident about the personal knowledge now available across distances, but he was sustaining an American dream of overcoming the nation’s vastness and also bringing the worthy up close. In the decade before the advent of cartes de visite, Mathew Brady had imagined a National Portrait Gallery, daguerreotypes replicated as engravings that would unify the nation.¹⁷ But modest, inexpensive cards ultimately created a far more inclusive nation in representation than he could have imagined in the 1840s.
And that nation was a nation at war over slavery. Cartes de visite were marshaled by enemies as well as allies in service to their cause. An anti-Confederate carte, probably dating to 1865, celebrates the Northern defeat of the South by hanging a row of cartes de visite portraits of Confederate generals from a pitchfork held by a rakish, sculpted satyr-devil (fig. 2). From his other hand, the winged devil dangles a miniature figure of Jefferson Davis lynched beneath a Confederate flag. This carte de visite is a sensational, we might say vernacular, condemnation of the enemy. Exploiting the new format available to many and disseminated widely, this card’s creator could be anyone with props, including other cartes de visite; a bit of cash; and the initiative to make personal political convictions both public and visual. Long before the Internet, the carte de visite was an object at once cheap, mass-produced, and broadly circulating—here was a medium that could turn folks not only into portrait sitters but into authors. This carte de visite, like that celebrating the Seventy-Sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, uses photographic portraits—in this case, other cartes de visite—as its key protagonists. The Confederate generals hang in effigy, but in effigy particularly modern in form: faded, dreary, and uniform photographic portraits were available to one and all, even enemies.
FIGURE 2. Anti-Confederate carte de visite with satyr-devil hanging Jefferson Davis from a noose topped by a seven-star Confederate flag from 1861; dangling from his pitchfork are seven portraits of Generals Davis, Stephens, Lee, Stonewall, Beauregard, and Price, ca. 1865. On the verso: F. Guntekunst Photographer. 704 & 706 Arch St., Philada.
This carte de visite features two different photographic images of Jefferson Davis: the topmost carte de visite hanging at right, and the small visage excised from another photographic card and attached to the hanging effigy at left. In fact the majority of such composite cartes de visite featured this Confederate leader. Especially popular were cartes de visite showing Davis’s attempt to escape the Union army on May 10, 1865, purportedly by disguising himself as a woman (figs. 3–4). His photographed head was cut out of cartes de visite and pasted onto drawings, prints, and other photographs, then rephotographed and made into new cartes de visite. Such pictures are important reminders that having one’s portrait taken in this medium risked entering the fray of public debate. In the midst of war, opponents could slap together insulting collaged photographs: Jefferson Davis could be depicted escaping in a dress (when he claimed that he was simply wearing his wife’s shawl for warmth), and Abraham Lincoln could be travestied by blackface (fig. 5). Cartes de visite were far from being Holmes’s domestic frivolity; they could aggrandize the formerly enslaved, delivering them into the personhood of portraiture, and they could also be used to denigrate the enemy. In either case, these modest objects were tools of war.
FIGURE 3. Anti-Confederate carte de visite caricaturing Jefferson Davis, 1865. On the verso: Entered according to the Act of Congress in the year 1865, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Northern District of Illinois, by P.T. Sherlock, Book, News & Periodical Dealer, 112 Dearborn Street, Chicago.
FIGURE 4. Anti-Confederate carte de visite caricaturing Jefferson Davis, 1865. On the verso: Wenderoth & Taylor. 912–914 Chestnut Street Philadelphia
and two-cent tax stamp that dates it between August 1, 1864, and August 1, 1866.
FIGURE 5. Anti-Union carte de visite of Abraham Lincoln in blackface, ca. 1861–65. On the recto: B.H. Benham Photographer.
Benham had a studio in Norwalk, Ohio, a hotbed for Copperheadism, so it is possible that the photographer was a Peace Democrat with very strong anti-Lincoln views.
: : :
Sojourner Truth was one of the many sitters for cartes de visite who would not have been able to afford a painted portrait, although she may have had a daguerreotype taken in 1850 to be reproduced as the engraving facing her Narrative’s title page. The woman Sojourner Truth is elusive and the archival evidence contradictory, but we do know salient facts about her life, some of which I list here:
She was born a slave named Isabella Baumfree, perhaps in 1797.¹⁸
She spoke Dutch as her first language in an Upstate New York community.
She was separated from her parents in 1810, when she was sold by her first owner for a hundred dollars; she was probably thirteen years old (fig. 6).
She had three different slave owners the first year she was separated from her parents.¹⁹
She was beaten as a slave; she also lost a portion of her right hand’s index finger in a field accident in 1826.²⁰
She bore five children between 1815 and 1826, one of whom died.
She expressed affection toward her last owner, but in 1826 at the age of thirty, she ran away after completing the spinning of some one hundred pounds of wool, work that she felt she owed him.
She took her baby Sophia when she ran away from her master, but she left behind her husband and her three other children.²¹
She moved in 1828 to New York City, where she did household work and lived with a kind family until 1832.²²
She joined a religious commune, the Kingdom of Matthias, in 1832 after having already moved from a Methodist church to the Zion African Church while in New York City. She remained loyal to its leader despite the fact that he beat her; in 1835 he was charged with murder.²³
She went to court three times and won all three cases. In 1828 she litigated to recover her son Peter, who had been illegally sold into slavery. In 1832 she filed a slander suit in response to the scandal surrounding the Kingdom of Matthias and won $125 and costs. In 1865 she brought assault charges against a Washington, DC, streetcar conductor who tried to throw her off his car; he was dismissed from his job.²⁴
She renamed herself Sojourner Truth in 1843 at the age of forty-six.
She wrote a book with the help of two different women friends and paid for its first printing in 1850 on credit; she later recovered the printing plates and reissued the book in three further editions in 1875, 1878, and 1881. The last posthumous edition of 1884 was entitled Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time, with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence Drawn from Her Book of Life
; Also, a Memorial Chapter, Giving the Particulars of Her Last Illness and Death.²⁵
She published letters in the press throughout her life.
She had a bank account.²⁶
She campaigned on behalf of the abolition of slavery, the suffrage of African Americans and women, the rights to education and property for suddenly emancipated slaves, the desegregation of streetcars, and the elimination of capital punishment.
She was a moving speaker. According to a Quaker abolitionist, she poured forth a torrent of natural eloquence which swept everything before it.
²⁷
She worked tirelessly from 1864 to 1867 on behalf
